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Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

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Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#161

Post by curiousDog »

tomkit wrote: post #135

I'm breaking a 4 yr HN commenting-hiatus to post this: it's a bit disappointing to see how the quality of HN comments has deteriorated over the years. Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber. This is a plead to the HN moderators to continue to iterate on your product to improve the quality of the comments.

I think that's a reputation Uber has built for themselves. I've seen a couple of commenters here who consistently used to denounce every Lyft article and praise Uber without disclosing they worked there.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#162

Post by yeukhon »

tomkit wrote: post #135

I'm breaking a 4 yr HN commenting-hiatus to post this: it's a bit disappointing to see how the quality of HN comments has deteriorated over the years. Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber. This is a plead to the HN moderators to continue to iterate on your product to improve the quality of the comments.

> Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber.

Point them out here, if you disagree. How do I prove to you that I spoke with a Lyft driver who prefers other car service apps over Uber? I am not going to prove it. Take it as a fact, or don't.

Let people post what they want to say. We don't need everyone to write like a professional critic or columnist. This is not a competition for Best Comment. I like sharing my thoughts with people regardless of how much content I can fill my comment with. You like to keep yourself mute from commentary, that's okay. If you think you are hearing echoes, perhaps there is truth to this? Or perhaps we should conjecture a conspiracy theory that a competitor is running a destroy-uber campaign here on this thread, like they planned a bunch of accounts weeks or months ago. Yeah there are a lot of fake online identities out there (esp during election time). Shall we continue with this conspiracy theory?

Let's move on with our life, we have bigger things to worry about than an echo chamber on HN.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#163

Post by curun1r »

chipgap98 wrote: post #3

That's a huge "bug" not to notice for presumably a long time. I recently had a Lyft driver in NYC talk to me about how he quit uber after doing the math on what his fare should have been when a passenger told him how much they were being charged. He brought it up to uber and then quit when they didn't fix it. Anecdotal story but seems extremely relevant now

I've also had Lyft drivers tell me that they stopped driving for Uber after they didn't pay promised bonuses for meeting certain metrics and that Lyft was more reliable in that department. I don't know whether it's a coordinated effort by Lyft to disparage Uber or whether it's just a common thing that happens to Uber drivers, but I've had four drivers tell me that and two did it with almost no prompting.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#164

Post by misiti3780 »

greenyoda wrote: post #157
robbyking wrote: post #49

This is the same company whose founder "took the tax dollars from employee paychecks — which are supposed to be withheld and sent to the Internal Revenue Service — and reinvested the money into the start-up, even as friends and advisers warned him the action was potentially illegal." [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanic...

It's not potentially illegal, it's unquestionably illegal. Money withheld for taxes doesn't belong to the employer; it has already been paid to its employees, who are trusting the employer to pay it to the government on their behalf, as required by federal and state law. So it's (1) stealing from employees and (2) tax fraud. If the authorities had found out about it, he'd have gone to prison.

in a previous life, i worked for someone (small start up) that did exactly this to me. I reported him to the authorities, and he is not in prison. I depends on the size of the amount stolen and how busy your local DA's office is.

I was in NYC.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#165

Post by yeukhon »

aetherson wrote: post #94
Balgair wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the post, but there was a 'UBER finance guy' (self-claimed) on HN a few weeks back that 'spilled the beans' and quit on what Uber is actually: a sub-prime auto loan company. Again, this is my recollection, take it with salt. It goes like: Driver (D): I want to drive for Uber! Uber (U): Sure! Do you have a car that is safe and less than 5 years old? (I have no idea what the car reqs. are) D: No U: Ok, wel…

I'm as negative as the next guy on Uber, and that's a great narrative, but they are losing vast quantities of money. Any dastardly deed that they do has to square itself with the fact that they are losing vast quantities of money. A predatory auto-loan company is not a $70B business.

I said this before, Uber should seriously consider closing down its operation in other countries. It is expanding virtually exponentially (they have a huge engineering team) for the type of company they are running. They need to focus on the U.S. market. They are losing way too much money everywhere combiend.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#166

Post by Jabanga »

aianus wrote: post #150
accountyaccount wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't give me this happy horseshit masquerading as philosophy, this isn't about what "laws" or "ethics" are — Uber is constantly treating their drivers, who are people, like garbage.

I'm a part-time Uber driver and I've never been treated like garbage by them. They pay me exactly what they say they'll pay me and on time. If I don't like the rate I'm earning, I turn it off and go home.

Thanks for providing your perspective. Articles relating to powerful parties who reject established political mores (e.g. prohibitions on unlicensed business activity, redistributive taxation) illicit a lot of demagogic reactions and attempts to cast the party as some kind of terrible menace to society.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#167

Post by Jabanga »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #38
Jabanga wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity. If abiding by the law was people's only priority, there would be no widespread usage of public key cryptography (it was extremely illegal in the early 1990s, and only gained legal acceptance after cypherpunks pushed back against the laws and proliferated its use), which would have prevented…

> One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity. This here is one of my all time favorite false-equivalences. People performing sit-ins during the Civil Rights era, or women standing up for their right to vote are equivalent to a corporation that wants to run without paying for its drivers health-insurance. It's another example of the c…

>It's absurd how much our country is going to profit models that consist of nothing more than "make the same revenue, and externalize the costs onto society."

Uber is not externalising costs to society. It is providing employment opportunities that otherwise would not exist, and rides at prices that would otherwise be higher.

Taking market share from competitors by offering consumers lower prices is not a case of "externalizing costs onto society".

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#168

Post by Jabanga »

dragonwriter wrote: post #36
Jabanga wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity. If abiding by the law was people's only priority, there would be no widespread usage of public key cryptography (it was extremely illegal in the early 1990s, and only gained legal acceptance after cypherpunks pushed back against the laws and proliferated its use), which would have prevented…

> Also worth noting that Amazon didn't charge a sales tax for a long time. Amazon actively and vigorously sought to make sure it stayed within the previously-established exceptions to the requirement to collect a sales tax for quite a long time, which is different thing than flouting the law.

>Amazon actively and vigorously sought to make sure it stayed within the previously-established exceptions to the requirement to collect a sales tax for quite a long time,

Source?

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#169

Post by Jabanga »

nradov wrote: post #72
Jabanga wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity. If abiding by the law was people's only priority, there would be no widespread usage of public key cryptography (it was extremely illegal in the early 1990s, and only gained legal acceptance after cypherpunks pushed back against the laws and proliferated its use), which would have prevented…

Public key cryptography wasn't illegal within the USA in the early 1990s. The legal issue was with exports.

Right. And the development of a global ecommerce market would have been severely hampered if the cypherpunks hadn't won the "crypto wars".

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#170

Post by omegaworks »

leggomylibro wrote: post #78
criddell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read about stuff like this and also how Uber is losing a lot of money, I have to wonder if maybe there's a fundamental problem with their business model.

There is; they are hemorrhaging money, and only manage to stay afloat because of the billions of dollars being shoveled into the furnace by investors and nation-states. In a way, venture capital is subsidizing your rides. They're not insane, though. They're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets while they still have the market on lock. Without having to pay drivers or…

> against an app!

Should that in some way magically exempt them from hard won (with blood [1]) labor protections?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

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